Iraq

Latest Articles

Iraq: A monumental and historic blunder

Tough truths
President Barack Obama is ending George W. Bush's war.
By EDITORIAL | December 14, 2011

Tasting Iraqi hospitality in Westbrook

A feast for a guest
At Mona's house in Westbrook, when a guest comes to visit, this is what she makes: a platter of yellow rice topped with golden bone-in chicken pieces, tomato-and chili-flake soup, a platter of beef dolmas, flatbread, pickled vegetables, fresh salad, watermelon, and a lemon-yogurt drink.
By LINDSAY STERLING | September 21, 2011

The Narcicyst rises as hip-hop's preeminent post-9/11 auteur

Iraqnophobia
Less than a year ago, the Narcicyst was on his way to a speaking engagement at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington DC, when customs hawks stopped him in his tracks.
By CHRIS FARAONE | September 07, 2011

'All hat, no cattle'

Rick Perry’s candidacy. Plus, news from Iraq and Pakistan, and the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
And so it came to pass, another God-fearing right-wing nut has joined the field competing for the Republican nomination to run against President Barack Obama next year.
By EDITORIAL | August 17, 2011

Review: The Devil's Double

Like Scarface , but with a difference
Watching this litany of murder and debauchery in the gilded splendor of Saddam's Baghdad, in which Dominic Cooper plays both Saddam's psycho son Uday and the Iraqi good guy Latif, who was forced to serve as his double, I thought: this is like Scarface, but with a difference.
By PETER KEOUGH | August 02, 2011

Whatever happened to Danville's giant mystery monkey?

Unfinished (monkey) business
The giant monkey of Danville was my symbol, back then, of the fin-de-siècle nadir in media fluffery, thankfully obsolesced in one grim morning.
By DAVID S. BERNSTEIN | August 04, 2011

By | January 01, 0001

Will anything change now that Osama is dead?

Give peace a chance
The death of Osama bin Laden and the impending 10-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks have many people contemplating the gains and futility of nearly a decade of American engagement overseas.
By DEIRDRE FULTON | May 04, 2011

Libya: Why Obama is right

What's wrong with saving lives?
That the nation is apprehensive and ambivalent about President Barack Obama's military intervention in Libya is natural, even healthy.
By EDITORIAL | March 31, 2011

Review: A Marine's Guide to Fishing

A snapshot of a returned veteran's life
On the one-year anniversary of a life-changing incident on a foreign battleground, a Marine (Matthew Pennington) begins to take up his old life again.
By JEFF INGLIS | March 09, 2011

Review: RISD's '2011 Faculty Biennial' impresses and inspires

A visual buffet
The Rhode Island School of Design's "2011 Faculty Biennial" at the RISD Museum (20 North Main Street, Providence, through March 20) features more than 200 teachers for a varied buffet ranging from tangled noodley junk sculpture to sleek architecture designs to loose abstract paintings.
By GREG COOK | March 02, 2011

What's gotten into Egypt?

Plus, Republicans for same-sex marriage, and trying to kill health-care reform
Being a dictator is a tough business. Just ask Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
By EDITORIAL | February 03, 2011

In a perfect world: Ranked-choice voting

Make that "fraud"
My unbiased analysis of the 2010 Maine gubernatorial election reveals that most voters didn't want any of the candidates to win. The proof? A sizable majority voted against each of them.
By AL DIAMON | November 24, 2010

Review: The Lyric does Dickens

Plus Iraq in the Aftermath
Plenty of theaters make A Christmas Carol sing. But the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, under the frenzied baton of Spiro Veloudos, is rendering an entire Dickensian symphony in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
By CAROLYN CLAY | November 04, 2010

Cooking classes taught by refugees give the real scoop

Sumac and citric acid
The kitchen of St. Pius X Church at the north corner of Payson Park was particularly steamy on the muggy, unusually hot night of October 1.
By LINDSAY STERLING | October 07, 2010

By | January 01, 0001

Just a reprieve? Unless Republican leaders learn from the past, another Iraq is in our future

In terms of foreign policy, the Republican Party remains unapologetically committed to Bush/Cheneyism
In his address to the nation Tuesday evening, discussing the end of American combat operations in Iraq, Barack Obama took great pains to be apolitical, nonjudgmental, and even gracious toward his predecessor.
By EDITORIAL | September 01, 2010

Holy Everglades, Batman!

A 'gator in the biggest little; angry Americans are still angry; a few great women
What a shock to see the discovery of an alligator at Sissons Pond in Portsmouth! Based on the photographs, Phillipe and Jorge reckon it has to be the largest reptile ever seen in the Biggest Little outside of the State House.
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | September 01, 2010

Afghanistan: The war that's killing us

Interview: Former Army colonel and current Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich explains why staying is a big mistake
For several years now, I've been reading Andrew Bacevich's articles and books that argue for a reimagination of how American government conceives of and executes foreign policy.
By PETER KADZIS | August 02, 2010

The 13th Annual Muzzle Awards

A look at the dishonorable enemies of free speech and personal liberty in New England
A year and a half into the Age of Obama, we are learning a lesson we should have figured out long ago — that repression, once in place, is rarely rolled back all the way, and that liberals no less than conservatives are reluctant to give up power.
By DAN KENNEDY | July 05, 2010

Interview: Sebastian Junger

Getting up close and personal with Restrepo
Not even being held captive by armed militants in Nigeria satisfied The Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger's need for dangerous assignments.
By PETER KEOUGH | June 30, 2010

Review: The A-Team

We love it when a plan comes together
This fun big-screen reboot takes the quartet of fugitive vigilantes-for-hire into the digital era, and it succeeds because director Joe Carnahan doesn't let technology overpower personality.
By BETSY SHERMAN | June 18, 2010

Mickey Mouse Multiculturalism

Governor Patrick's problematic Mosque visit. Plus, Bush — and the GOP — vote yes for torture
Massachusetts treasurer and independent candidate for governor Tim Cahill was off base when he accused incumbent governor Deval Patrick of "playing politics with terrorism" in the wake of Patrick's visit to the controversial Roxbury mosque maintained by the Islamic Society of Boston.
By EDITORIAL | June 14, 2010

Game Changer

After decades of lackluster releases, the video-game-turned-film genre may have finally found its royalty
For the worse part of two decades, Hollywood has been trying to discover the formula for successfully adapting video games to the big screen.
By BRETT MICHEL | June 04, 2010

A Rhode Island filmmaker’s tribute to the Good War

Heroes
Amid the moral ambiguity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the handwringing over weapons of mass destruction, drone attacks, and the rights of detainees — there is something startling about the raw patriotism of the documentary Navy Heroes of Normandy .
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | June 02, 2010

High-octane coverage

The Huffington Post owns Gulf coverage; plus, that Hitchens memoir
Despite admirable wall-to-wall coverage from the national mainstream press and unusually in-depth reports from network television and cable, the Huffington Post has emerged as perhaps the single best go-to source for developing news and wide-ranging commentary about the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
By PETER KADZIS | June 07, 2010

Balls of fire

Porn stars, witch doctors, elephant farts, and the worst soccer team on the planet take center stage at this summer’s World Cup
For one month every four years, the United States — try as it might — can’t impose its vacuous culture on the rest of the planet. The World Cup arrives and the Americans are, at best, an afterthought.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG AND LANCE GOULD | June 01, 2010

Embedded

A casualty of war, and a fierce debate
Linda Bhatia gave her son’s Scout badges to his old pack and his 700 books to his alma mater, Brown University, but she will never let go of the things he had in his final days: his compass, the dimes in his pocket, his wallet, the watch he was probably wearing when a roadside bomb killed him in Afghanistan.
By ELIZABETH RAU | May 26, 2010

Meet Evan Thomas

The parallel careers of Newsweek's premier wordsmith
Narrative is the throughline in the professional life of Evan Thomas.
By PETER KADZIS | May 13, 2010

Face the nation

SpeakEasy’s The Great American Trailer Park Musical; Zeitgeist’s Farragut North
White-trash collection has seldom been as hilarious as it is in The Great American Trailer Park Musical , which makes its Brahmin-area debut courtesy of SpeakEasy Stage Company.
By CAROLYN CLAY | May 04, 2010